Detecting Deception Close to Home

Parents and really anyone who works with kids can attest to many children’s tendency to lie. While these might take the form of minor fibs of who hit whom, and that sort of common deception, it is not just our anecdotal impression that children are often dishonest. As Dr. Wendy Patrick explains, there is a…

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Emotionally Disguised Faces

Emotional and facial recognition may be even more closely linked than we thought. In past blogs, we have discussed how better understanding facial recognition may help us better understand emotional recognition, and we have also talked about how understanding emotions requires similar processes as those which identify faces. During that discussion, we explained how recognizing…

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Prenatal Facial Recognition

We already know that faces are incredibly central to human interaction, but facial recognition may also be fundamental to our brain’s development. Science has long demonstrated that even newborn infants have a strong preference for human faces over other stimuli. Now, a new study from the University of California, Los Angeles, may have found that…

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Deception as Human Nature, Part I

Is lying part of our fundamental human nature? While we often like to think of lying as some sort of aberration from normal human behavior, the truth may be much less pleasant. An increasing number of studies are illustrating that lies and deception are not only ubiquitous in our everyday behavior but also serve a…

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